


A Particular Type of Trouble

by kmfillz



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Brief Merrill (Dragon Age), Drunk Sex, First Time, M/M, Pining, Requited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 18:24:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14550630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmfillz/pseuds/kmfillz
Summary: "Don't you ever get lonely?" Merrill asked.Varric dragged his eyes away from the sight of Isabela's fingers trailing lightly over the bare, tanned skin of Hawke's arm."With all my friends around me? Why would I be lonely?"(An exchange gift written forChildren of the Stone 2018.)





	A Particular Type of Trouble

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamkist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamkist/gifts).



"Varric, do you have a girlfriend?"

Varric peered at Merrill through the smoky atmosphere of the Hanged Man. She looked as earnest as she always did. Nevertheless, he had a suspicion the little blood mage was hiding a world of mischief behind those sweet, innocent-looking eyes of hers. Not murderous, demon-summoning mischief -- he wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong impression. She was astoundingly gentle for a blood mage. But he never could be sure when her endless font of social awkwardness was secretly spiked with with something a little more playful.

For now, Varric was willing to play. "Daisy," he told her, with his hand on his breast, "you know my heart belongs only to Bianca."

Hawke elbowed him in the ribs, smiling wickedly. "But not your body, surely?"

Unlike Merrill, Varric had no doubt about the man seated to his right: Hawke was a straight shot of intoxicating trouble. When he'd first heard of Hawke, a long, long year ago, that had been the exact word used: _Rumor is, Athenril's new lieutenant is going to be trouble._ Varric had laughed at Gallard, then twirled his glass idly and said, _How's that? I thought the Coterie had Athenril's operations pretty much cornered._ Gallard was a careless man who never seemed to notice how much Coterie business leaked out of him on those nights when they played a friendly hand of diamondback. A good half the stuff that fell out of his mouth was pure horseshit the man was too stupid to recognize for what it was. When Gallard said Hawke would be trouble, however, truer words had never been spoken.

"In case you didn't notice, I spent the past month underground on my brother's insane expedition," Varric told his favorite trouble incarnate. "Not a lot of opportunities to meet cute dwarf girls down there."

"And before that?"

For one, before he'd met Hawke, his large circle of acquaintances had not included anyone who pried into his personal life the way Hawke and his merry band of misfits did. Given a brushoff about a subject they had no pressing reason to be interested in, most people would be happy to let the matter drop. The only people with any particular stake in Varric's love life were his relatives, and he was always happy to tell them to go suck a nug. His new friends had no stake in the matter beside Varric's own happiness, which paradoxically made their inquiries much harder to discourage.

He sighed. "The Merchants' Guild isn't a great environment for casual flings. Sleeping around is a good way to get your throat cut, or your family ruined."

Hawke leaned forward. Good, Hawke was always eager for gossip. For a moment, Varric thought he was out of the woods.

"Not all of the dwarves in Kirkwall are in the Merchants' Guild," Daisy pointed out. Hawke, now closer in Varric's space than ever, nodded seriously.

It was like being cornered by a pack of deepstalkers. Very friendly deepstalkers, mind you; the kind who were more likely to buy you a drink than bite off your face. (Andraste's tits, was he glad to be back in Kirkwall!)

"True," he conceded. "Some are Carta." He could spin stories about the Carta as easily as the Guild. The stories were the same for the most part, plus or minus a few details.

Another elbow to the ribs from Hawke. "Now who's perpetuating harmful stereotypes?"

"'Perpetuating harmful stereotypes'? You're starting to sound like whatsisname's manifesto."

Whatsisname cleared his throat irritably. Varric paid him no attention; a little teasing was good for Anders' overinflated sense of self-importance. Blondie could be a lot of fun, but he needed to lighten up. "In any case, the answer is no, Daisy, I'm not seeing anyone. Why do you ask? Know any nice dwarf girls I should meet?"

"No." Merrill frowned thoughtfully. "Do they have to be a dwarf? And a girl?"

Theoretically, no. In practice, the question was irrelevant. He grinned disarmingly and leaned back in his chair. "Now I see what this is about." He shook his head at the figure at the far end of the table. "Bad news, elf. The brooding just doesn't do it for me."

"I'm crushed," said Fenris, dry as a desert at noon. Merrill giggled.

Next to Varric, Hawke let out an exaggerated sigh. "One of these days you're going to break all our hearts, Varric."

"Not mine," said Anders cheerfully. "Dwarves aren't my type. Too short and hairy."

"Your loss, Blondie. Maybe you can be the one to heal the elf's wounded heart." Both men sputtered in outrage. Varric considered this to be a banner achievement.

"Mmmm, I'd _pay_ to watch that," purred a voice to his right. A tower of luscious Rivaini curves settled into Hawke's lap. There were any number of chairs Isabela could have taken as an alternative to using Hawke as living furniture, but Hawke seemed unbothered by the imposition. He wrapped a long arm comfortably around Isabela's linen-sheathed waist, and shifted forward in his seat until his nose was a hair's breadth from the cascade of dark hair spilling out from Isabela's blue kerchief. Varric saw Hawke inhale, breathing in Isabela's scent.

Merrill, however, wasn't done with her interrogation. "Don't you ever get lonely?"

He dragged his eyes away from the sight of Isabela's fingers trailing lightly over the bare, tanned skin of Hawke's arm.

"With all my friends around me? Why would I be lonely?"

"I meant lonely as in--"

"He knows what you meant, kitten." Isabela leaned over the table to ruffle Merrill's hair.

"Oh."

"Don't worry, Merrill," said Hawke with a wink. "For all his protestations, I don't for a second believe he'd have trouble finding a bedpartner if he wanted one."

"I'm touched by your faith in my pull."

"Come over here and you could be touched by something else." Hawke wriggled his eyebrows. Varric shivered at the warmth in Hawke's voice, even knowing that he was only kidding around. No one tossed someone like Isabela out of their lap for someone like Varric. All the same, Varric's too-eager imagination conjured phantom caresses from Hawke. His trousers felt more confining than they had a moment before.

Hawke was a whole mess trouble, and Varric had walked right into it.

* * *

When Hawke had first started flirting with him, Varric thought nothing of it. It was superficial banter, no more meaningful than Isabela leering at his chest hair. He didn't for a moment think that Hawke was seriously attracted to him. Human-dwarf pairings were beyond rare; disinterest like Anders' was the default. Now, Isabela might have gone for it; Varric suspected that woman would try just about anything once, but Hawke? Nah.

Gender wasn't the problem; he'd seen Hawke give Blondie's chest the same appreciative looks he gave the Rivaini's. But when it came to sleeping with the other races, Hawke might talk a good game -- doubly so with Isabela around to egg him on -- but all evidence said his adventurousness was restricted to matters outside the bedchamber. As far as Varric knew, he didn't even go for elves, and elf fetishes were as common on humans as fleas. If Hawke's tastes were too narrow for that, sincere interest in dwarves was out of the question.

Hawke _had_ directly propositioned Varric once, in the Deep Roads, at some point in that undifferentiable stretch of time following Bartrand's betrayal. Things had been tense, exhausted, and desperate down there, and they'd all said things they only half meant. Most of those things were along the lines of "I'll throttle you if say the word 'templar' one more time, Blondie," or "I would trade my little brother for a clean change of clothing," but all the same, when Hawke had suggested a mutual relieving of tension, it hadn't sounded like anything but darkness and frustration talking. Just another one of those things they'd said to blow off steam. He'd treated the suggestion with all the solemnity it deserved, brushing it off without intending to give it a second thought.

Unfortunately, intention only got him so far. The longer he knew Hawke, the harder it was to deny his attraction to the tall mage. Hawke was hot in a human way -- long limbs and relatively narrow frame, but put together in a way that really worked for Varric, with a killer grin hiding in his short, dark beard, and twinkling brown eyes. But Hawke's good looks were only part of the problem. Varric knew a lot of attractive people, dwarves and humans alike. If he were bothered by being surrounded by attractive people, he'd have to shut himself inside his suite and become a recluse like his mother before him. No, the heart of the problem was that there was no one else like Hawke.

Take, for example, the Deep Roads expedition.

None of them had handled its surprise plot twist well. Varric had fallen into a depressive funk. He'd tried to keep up the good humor, but good humor felt like something he'd left behind on the surface, along with the open sky and the assumption that his older brother would never leave him to die. Of all of them, Anders had seemed the least subdued. Maybe it was because accommodations here were a step up from Darktown, or maybe, despite his reluctance to come on the expedition, some Grey Warden instincts were reemerging. Whatever the reason, Anders' spirit remained high enough that between loud complaints and sarcastic remarks, he'd had the energy to grace them with his customary speeches about the dangers of making speeches about the dangers of magic. He'd come to actual blows with Carver twice. The younger Hawke had handled their entombment even worse than expected. If anyone had thought his usual surliness was insufferable, this journey was a revelation of just how bad his disposition could get. Junior was halfway to crying most of the time -- crying or hitting things.

Varric had caught the elder Hawke on the edge of despair only once. Hawke had taken the second watch, Varric the third. Despite his exhaustion, Varric had risen early, and he'd found Hawke sitting there staring out into the cavern beyond, eyes suspiciously wet.

Varric sat down beside him on the fallen column. He didn't have to ask what Hawke saw when he looked out there.

"I don't want to die here in the dark," Hawke whispered hoarsely.

In a better time, Varric would have come up with words to comfort him or a joke to lighten the mood. Instead, he said, just as quietly, "Me neither."

It wasn't as pitch black down there as you might expect it to be in the bowels of the earth. Dwarven architecture made use of less transitory light sources than the lamps and torches found in surfacer mines. The Deep Roads proper were lit by the glow from lava flows (at least, that's what Bartrand claimed they were; Varric had his doubts), and smaller paths branching from the main highway were set with those strange, sparkling stones that you found sometimes in the caves around Kirkwall. But the paths they were wandering now had been rundown eons past, before the dwarven empire had fallen to the darkspawn. Some passages had crumbled completely into darkness. In this cavern they'd made camp in, the gloom was oppressive.

The weight of a thousand tons of rock overhead squeezed the confession from Varric: "I'm glad at least you're down here with me."

"Ouch," Hawke sniffed. "I didn't know you hated me _that_ much."

Varric cast a glance sideways, for a moment alarmed that his friend might be serious. But it was Hawke, and Hawke was never serious if he could help it.

The planes of shadow on Hawke's face shifted, hinting at a smile. "I have to admit, if I have to be trapped down here, you're the Tethras I'd rather be trapped here with."

Varric laughed hollowly. "That would be more flattering if the competition weren't so dire."

"Do you have any family besides your brother?"

"It depends." Varric sighed. "When there's a will to be read, there's no shortage of relatives to contest the inheritance. When bills come due, Bartrand and I are the last of our line."

"I suppose I'm lucky I only have the one Uncle Gamlen." Hawke shrugged his large shoulders. "What about your parents?"

"Dead and buried under the earth. They're probably happier that way; they never did adjust to surface life." He sighed and looked up toward the cavern ceiling. Were those more spider webs he saw up there? "Me, I prefer the sunlight and air that doesn't stink of roast deepstalker and nug droppings." (The deepstalker had been a mistake. All four of them had had indigestion afterward. It hadn't been pretty.)

"It isn't like Lowtown smells much better."

Varric's voice was flat. "In Lowtown, if you want to, you can get up and leave." The longer he was down here, the more it felt like the earth was closing in on him from all sides, snuffing out their last glimmer of hope. Carver's tantrums were loud, but there was nobody to hear them except three men equally doomed.

"I'll get us out," Hawke said, softly but firmly. "None of us are going to die down here."

Varric took a breath of the stale air. "That's one doozy of a promise."

"Trust me."

And Varric had believed him.

The four of them never discussed how Hawke had become their unofficial leader, but that was how. He'd persevered. He'd kept all of them moving when they'd wanted to split up or lie down and let the darkness swallow them. He'd kept them going until his brother was tainted by darkspawn, and then he'd kept going until Anders found them Grey Wardens to take Carver, and then he'd kept going until they'd emerged into fresh air and sunlight and Varric could have kissed him.

He didn't, but he'd wanted to. He'd wanted nothing more than to pull that long, human body down into his arms and drink Hawke in. He couldn't explain it even to himself. Yes, Hawke was hot, but no one was hot enough to overcome the fact that after two months underground, the three of them were revolting. They'd hadn't bathed since Bartrand's betrayal, or washed their greasy hair, or changed their clothing, which stank of spider guts and worse. Anyone in their right mind would demand they maintain a distance of at least ten paces.

By the time they made it back to Kirkwall, Varric thought he'd put that strange ardor behind him. But here he was, blushing like a Chantry sister every time Hawke winked in his direction.

* * *

The Ancestors had a cruel sense of humor. There was no other explanation for the heavy arm draped over Varric's shoulder or the beer-scented moustache tickling his ear as Hawke whispered reassurance for the twelfth time that night... Other than that he had misjudged Merrill and Hawke. They weren't a deepstalker pack; they were a charging bronto. A lifetime of experience dodging Bartrand at his most single-minded wasn't enough to evade his two friends, united in their determination to find him some companionship.

Varric would have been happy to drink with those two late into the night, but when the company had thinned, Hawke had risen up like a shining tower on a dark plain and dragged them to a bar Varric knew of but rarely visited, for the very reason Hawke had brought them there now. The patrons of the Wounded Sparrow were mostly dwarves, about two thirds of them Carta by Varric's estimation.

Calling attention to oneself in a place like that wasn't the healthiest thing, but of course, danger had never deterred his companions -- nor, he was forced to admit, Varric himself -- nearly as often as it should have. They mingled, and mingled well, for all that there were at least two people at the bar that night Varric recognized as sworn enemies of his family.

Varric's reluctance on their arrival reshaped itself over the following two hours into pessimism. Much like the Hanged Man, women came to this bar armed with a forbidding demeanor or not at all. There were men aplenty, and unlike the Guild halls of Hightown, propositioning another man here wouldn't earn you a black eye, but there was little overlap tonight between the men who looked interested and the men who looked interesting.

The constant comparison to Hawke wasn't helping, on either end. No one here held a candle to Hawke, Varric and every other man here included. Only if you were open to human men, though, and folks don't come to a dwarf bar to hit on humans. Alas, Hawke was proving to be as much an exception to this rule as he was to every other. Varric was repeatedly distracted from his own hunt by the sight of would-be suitors approaching Hawke, thankfully only to be inevitably turned down.

As Varric's prospects got more and more dismal, Hawke's boundless confidence in Varric never wavered. Daisy was staunch in her support as well, but at last she called it a night and departed for the alienage, having drunk almost enough to inebriate a mid-sized mouse. Varric intended to follow suit and head home as well, but Hawke, who'd drunk enough to do in a small horse, wouldn't hear of it. He slung an arm carelessly around Varric's shoulders and insisted that someone here _had_ to have good taste.

Varric had never considered himself weak-willed, but he could not have shaken that arm off if he'd tried, could not have torn himself away from the feeling of Hawke's warm side pressed up against his. He was all too aware that if he stayed now, he was no longer even trying to pursue their stated goal here tonight. He was staying, he knew, to revel in Hawke's drunken affection, nothing more. 

"Makers balls!" Hawke was muttering. "What is wrong with these people? Do they have any idea what they're turning down?"

Varric coughed. "You know, I don't think they do. Why don't you enlighten them?"

Hawke straightened up, and for moment Varric thought he was really going to get up and track down some poor innocent soul to chide. Instead, Hawke pulled Varric closer, so that Varric's upper leg was pressed tight against Hawke's firm thigh. Hawke leaned forward to look Varric up and down. Combined with the physical proximity, the look was electric. Hawke sizing him up to fuck, even hypothetically, was a turn on.

"For one," Hawke whispered, face so close that Varric could feel Hawke's breath on his cheek, "there are your arms." Hawke gestured at them with his left hand, almost stroking Varric's bicep if not for a thin curtain of air. "And there are your eyes." Hawke's hand landed on his face, thumb caressing his cheek bone. Varric was entranced. "And your chest," Hawke continued. No air left between them now. Hawke's hand slid over the skin exposed by Varric's shirt and beyond, slipping underneath the fabric. Varric's breath caught in his throat. Hawke left the hand there. "And your clever fucking fingers. Who looks at those and doesn't think, 'I want those on me'..." He trailed off, as if in a reverie.

Varric remembered to breath. "You might be surprised," he tried to say. His voice was rough. He cleared his throat, and Hawke startled as if from a trance.

"Fuck. Sorry, Varric. I might be a little drunk."

"No shit," Varric muttered, and waited for the hand under his shirt to retract, or for Hawke to lean away. Neither of these things happened. They sat there for a long minute, staring at each other in silence.

"I think," Varric whispered, not believing what he was saying, "you might be the only person here with good taste."

Hawke didn't say a word. His eyes were darting back and forth Varric's face. Millimeter by millimeter, he leaned forward, until their mouths met. Varric's lips parted instinctively as the arm around his shoulders pulled him forward against Hawke. The table wobbled next to them. Varric broke off. "My place?"

Hawke's fingers dug into his chest as if trying to hold onto him. "Your place," Hawke replied breathlessly. His normally sardonic face looked dazed. _And people say dwarves can't do magic..._

Varric stood, and Hawke stumbled to his feet after him, unwilling to let go. Varric glanced down and got an eyeful of evidence that he wasn't the only one with blood rushing away from his head. He was going to take Hawke home and rip the clothes off of him and show him exactly what he could do with his fingers and every other body part. 

Varric grabbed onto Hawke's belt and half tugged him through the door. 

They made it as far as the alley before Hawke pushed Varric up against the wall and fell to his knees. Hawke kissed him passionately, bit him on the neck ("Ow!" "Sorry!"), then went to work on Varric's belt buckle. Varric pried his hands away with difficulty. "Four more blocks and you won't have to kneel in trash." 

Hawke looked up and blinked. "...Right." 

They didn't speak another word until the door to Varric's suite shut behind them. 

"Now," Varric said, face splitting into a gleeful grin, "weren't you in the middle of something?" 

Hawke's lips curled upward, and he descended to work. 


End file.
